CORBETT, Sir Julian Stafford.

Drake and the Tudor navy. With a history of the rise of England as a maritime power.

London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1898. 2 vols, 8vo (220 x 140 mm), pp. xvi, 436, 32 (advertisements);viii, 488, with 25 plates (four with explanatory leaves); original blue cloth, gilt; head and foot of spine a little frayed but a very good copy. First edition. ‘A masterly study’ (NMM). ‘When it was published it was at once acknowledged as a towering historical success . . . . At the age of fifty [Corbett] had forged a career; an amateur who had written a professional work that none of his contemporaries could match. Based on archival sources and in a detailed way that no one had previously attempted, he had enlarged at once the Elizabethan world, the perceived importance of the beginnings of English sea power, and his own reputation . . . . Corbett combined the virtues of the Laughton and Mahan approaches. From Mahan he learned, not meticulous use of detailed sources, but the salient fact that to pursue the minutiae of naval activity without a constant reference to the main purposes that generated that activity, was to wilfully distort historical perspective. Drake and the Tudor navy had plenty of action description in it, but those exhilarating events were firmly subordinated to the controlling theme of developing maritime and even State policy. Every powerful writer on maritime history since that time has recognized the importance of this approach’ (Schurman, Julian S. Corbett pp. 18–9).‘Corbett (1854–1922) came to naval history in mid-life and from a civilian background. He took a first in law at Cambridge but, never liking the legal profession and being a man of independent means, he retired from active practice altogether in 1882. He travelled extensively, sought a literary career, and wrote a few marginally successful novels. The popular biographies he wrote of Monk and Drake led him to join the Navy Record Society when that was founded in 1893. In 1896 he accepted Laughton’s [founder of the Navy Records Society] request to edit a volume of documents on the Spanish war, 1585–7. Thus began a career which was to dominate the rest of his life . . . . Corbett’s historical writings can be divided into two categories: the volumes he edited for the Navy Record Society on the development of British fighting-instructions and signals, and his histories of selected periods in British naval warfare. Both involved radically new interpretations of the past; the one of naval tactics, the other of naval strategy. In line with these came a new understanding of the present’ (Gat, History of military thought p. 480).NMM V 193; Read 3212.

• GBP 550.00 > other currencies
• ordernr.: T2403

• bookseller: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. (GREAT BRITAIN)